The dog days take their name from Sirius, the Dog Star, whose rising in the summer sky was associated in antiquity with scorching heat. Across July and August, Notes moved from arguments about persistence and the refusal of adaptation to the ownership of cities, institutional censorship, a contested swimming pool in Berlin, and the changing conditions in which artists’ films are made, shown, and understood.
Rebecca Comay’s “On Persistence,” excerpted from her new book, distinguishes persistence from the virtues of resilience and fortitude as a force that is more uncanny and “ill-adaptive: brittle, unbending, uncompliant, impatient, inefficient, untimely.” Alenka Zupančič challenges the political mantra to “adapt to the new reality” in “What If the Interregnum Is the Regnum?” Tom Allen writes on Daniel Spaulding’s Joseph Beuys and History and its attempt to “hold open the wound” that Beuys represents in postwar art history, while Alexi Kukuljevic’s reading of Rose-Anne Gush’s Artistic Labour of the Body explores the theme of the unhealing wound in VALIE EXPORT and Elfriede Jelinek.
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s “The Thinking Machine: Response to Yuk Hui” takes up the question of whether contemporary AI can meaningfully be understood through concepts of recursivity, reflection, and autonomy. Elisa R. Linn speaks with Sung Tieu about migration politics, historical amnesia, and her work for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Isa Jacobs reports from the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on communist-era hijinks, orgasmic body swaps, and petrol porn. Mario García Torres writes a letter to the late Natasha Gelman about the contested future of the Gelman Collection. And in “Before There Is a Language for It,” Anton Vidokle reflects on the complicated relationship between artists and theory and introduces a forthcoming collection of artists’ writings drawn from nearly two decades of e-flux publishing.
In August, Notes returned to its archive with Who Owns the City? Art and the Property Economy, a series of eight republications on art, real estate, urban redevelopment, gentrification, and public space. Read together, the texts look at the ways cultural production becomes entangled with the production of property value and the transformation of cities.
Two other August pieces dealt with conflicts around cultural institutions as they were unfolding. “Taiwanese Artists Accuse Gwangju Biennale of Censorship Over Pavilion Naming” reports on a dispute over the naming of Taiwan’s participation in the biennale. “The Pool Is Already There” looks at Matthias Lilienthal’s temporary swimming pool at Berlin’s Volksbühne, and the political controversy around the project.
Film Notes spent July moving between very different conditions of filmmaking and spectatorship. Vadim Rizov considers what is gained and lost when Bruce Conner’s 16 mm films become large-scale digital museum installations. In “Figure Minus Fact: A Conversation,” Mary Helena Clark discusses a film practice in which sound and language continually alter what images seem to mean. Kidlat Tahimik’s 1986 essay makes a case for “cups-of-gas filmmaking,” in which time and flexibility allow a film to develop outside the usual demands of financing and deadlines. Matthew Lax’s “Trading Spaces (Darkroom/White Cube)” returns to fragmentary memories and images of a vanished Los Angeles gay sex club, asking what is lost when the darkroom becomes the white cube.
In August, Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep. A Conversation considered the decision to set the ancient epic in present-day Upper Mesopotamia with an all-woman Kurdish cast, treating the story as an unfinished work rather than something to be reconstructed faithfully. “Between Cinema and the Gallery: A Conversation” brought together New York curators and programmers to discuss artists’ moving images as they circulate between film festivals and contemporary art institutions. In “Metabolic Grammars,” Abirami Logendran looked at artists reediting archival materials through diasporic histories and traditions remade through displacement. Hollis Frampton’s “Film in the House of the Word” closed the month with a 1980 essay on film’s uneasy relationship to language.
—Editors
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